There are many safety syringe designs available today. Some of these designs have a sleeve or a sheath that will cover the needle after it has been used. Some typical designs with sleeves or sheaths are Z. M. Roehr et al U.S. Pat. No. 3,008,570, Z. M. Roehr U.S. Pat. No. 3,107,785, Bartner, et al U.S. Pat. No. 3,895,633, G K Burke U.S. Pat. No. 3,306,291, Gyure et al U.S. Pat. No. 4,300,678, Winstead Hall U.S. Pat. No. 4,356,822, Sampson et al U.S. Pat. No. 4,425,120, Larson U.S. Pat. No. 4,639,249, Harbaugh U.S. Pat. No. 4,655,751, Strauss U.S. Pat. No. 4,664,654, Spencer U.S. Pat. No. 4,702,738, Milorad U.S. Pat. No. 4,702,739, Spencer U.S. Pat. No. 4,801,295, Poncy U.S. Pat. No. 4,815,022, and Hughes U.S. Pat. No. 4,840,619.
Other designs have a retractable needle such as Weltman U.S. Pat. No. 3,306,290, and Dent U.S. Pat. No. 4,392,859. These designs do not have a means whereby the needle is extended from the syringe and held in place in a positive and rigid position in order to first inject the needle prior to injecting the medication. Still other designs have methods of bending the needle to render it harmless after the medication has been injected. Most of these designs have one major purpose and that is to prevent the spread of infectious diseases such as aids, hepatitis, or other diseases from an accidental injection with a contaminated needle into others after the needle of the syringe has been inserted into a patient with the above mentioned diseases. These various designs all work well up to a degree, but they all fall short of their intended purpose during the act of covering the needle, or removing the needle, which requires two hands.
All of these designs require at least two hands to operate. The use of two hands to cover the contaminated needle is most unsatisfactory in that during the act of placing a second hand on the syringe the person holding the syring in one hand may be bumped and accidentally inject the needle into their other hand before it can grasp the syringe. Other accidental jabbing or injections can happen in an ambulance just as a person tries to grasp the syringe with a contaminated needle, the ambulance can hit a bump in the road causing the person holding the syringe to accidentally stick another person or themselves with the contaminated needle. The need has developed for a syringe that will cover the contaminated needle with the use of only one hand.
All of these designs also combine the needle cannula with the syringe and therefore create a storage problem. At present, needle cannulas are fixed to the hub but not to the syringe so that a variety of lengths and guages of needle cannulas are stored in one locker or storage cabinet which may contain about twenty various lengths and gauges of needle cannulas; an inventory of about twenty or more of each guages and lengths of needle cannulas may be stored in each section. There may also be about ten sizes of syringes with about twenty or more of each syringe stored in the same locker. When a given quantity of a given medicament is required, the proper size of needle cannula is fitted to the proper syringe thereby combining the right length and guage of needle cannula with the right size of syringe.
All of the above inventions would require an inventory ten times of that of the present invention. Each needle cannula size would have to be fixed to each syringe size and each syringe size would have to be fixed to each needle cannula size and this would be hundreds of needle cannula syringe combinations which would be multiplied by ten each; the numbers required for the necessary inventory in a given floor of a hospital would be astronomical. The need has developed for a safety needle cannula that would be a module apart from the syringe.
It is the object of this invention is to provide a needle cannula wherein the needle that is used is independent of the syringe and is retracted into the modual hub chamber and protects others from an accidental pricking after the needle cannula has been used, the needle can be retracted into the modual hub chamber with the use of only one hand and that one hand being the hand that was used to inject the needle into the patient.
Another object of the present invention is to render the needle cannula useless after the needle cannula is retracted into the modual hub chamber and to further prevent the reuse and abuse by users of illict drugs.
It is still another object of the present invention to further prevent the accidental release of the needle cannula after the needle cannula is in the hub chamber.
It is still yet another object of the present invention to provide a safety needle cannula without modifying the syringe.
The foregoing and other objects and advantages are attained by a spring needle cannula, a hub chamber, a hub to fix the device to a standard syringe, an inclined plane latching means and a latch release means wherein when said needle cannula is used to inject a drug, medicament, or other material into a body the latch release means is activated and the coiled spring cannula withdraws the distal end of said spring needle cannula into the hub chamber rendering the spring needle cannula harmless to prevent the accidental pricking of others and to prevent the contaminated spring needle cannula from being removed from the hub chamber.
The features of the present invention can be best understood together with further objects and advantages by reference to the following descriptions when taken in connection with accompanying drawings, wherein like numerals indicate like parts.